Choreographer Mark Foehringer grew up in a dance company in Brazil that did community events. Years later, running his own eponymous dance company in San Francisco, he wanted to do performances everyone could enjoy.
So, every year for Bay Area Dance Week, he puts on one of its highlights: Dancing in the Park in Golden Gate Park.
Foehringer looks forward to engaging the audience every year. “It’s really fun to all get together to celebrate what we love so much,” he says. “We spend so much time in the studios, making dances, that we don’t get to see each other’s work. It’s like a huge open door for those who may be curious about what a particular style of dance is like… That’s one of my favorite parts about it.”
Bay Area Dance Week's Kickoff is One Dance, held this year in Jesse Square on April 24th at 12pm.(Robbie Sweeny/Courtesy of BADW)
Bay Area Dance Week (BADW), taking place this year from April 24th to May 3rd, began in 1998, putting the diversity of the dance scene here on display with open rehearsals, classes, workshops and performances throughout the Bay Area—all for free. It is wildly popular, with about 21,000 attendees showing up to more than 150 events last year that included styles like Bhangra, K-Pop, hip hop, aerial, folk, and West African.
Anyone can join in the kickoff One Dance, which takes place at noon on April 24th. Dudley Flores, the artistic director of the beloved San Francisco Rhythm and Motion who leads the event, puts the moves online ahead of time so people can learn them. Several hundred participate in the event, which is held in high visibility spaces in San Francisco such as at Union Square, City Hall’s rotunda, and at the Yerba Buena Gardens. This year, One Dance will be at Jesse Square, in front of the former Jewish Contemporary Museum building.
Flores grew up in the city and went to University of San Francisco, planning to become a doctor. Looking for something to do other than studying for his biology class or work (he also had a full-time job with the airlines), he took a class at USF called Rhythm and Motion that was billed for everyone, no experience necessary. Just the warmup exhausted him, but after making it through the class, he was hooked.
For One Dance, he starts by picking the music, choosing something infectious. This year, he chose two songs: “Makeba” by Jain and “Energy” by Mical Teja.
The Art of Gesture: Central Asian & Persian-Inspired Dance is on April 30th at 5:30pm(Billy Chang/Courtesy of BADW)
“This year, just sort of in light of the world and how people are feeling, I wanted to focus on joy,” Flores says. “Dancing and community bring people together, and dancing can help us fill our cup.”
The dance community in the Bay Area is the largest per capita in the country, says Wayne Hazzard, the executive director of Dancer’s Group, presenter of BADW. The festival lives up to that reputation with more than 2,500 artists participating.
The inspiration for BADW came from the way visual artists welcome everyone inside their studios several times a year, says Hazzard. “The thought was to model this after the wonderful Open Studios, so you open your door in some way, whether to a class or a performance setting, and show what you want to show… In that way, it embraced the kind of radical ethos that is the Bay Area.”
Throughout the year, Hazzard meets people who ask what he does, and when he tells them he works with Dancers Group, they invariably tell him they know about Dance Week.
It’s not just locals who come. Hazzard meets people from other states who travel just for the festival, especially for the opening event.
Free Fry Body Music Jam is April 26th at 1pm(Courtesy of BADW)
“We would have people come specifically for One Dance,” he says. “They would learn the moves from Dudley online, and they would fly from Chicago to perform it on their vacation. People are like, ‘I get to do this fun thing, and it's in this beautiful city, and somebody's teaching me to do it’—and we would just be amazed when we saw people coming from all over the US to participate.”
Foehringer’s company celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, and their style is what he calls contemporary ballet. (“If you ask ballet dancers, they say it's contemporary dance. If you ask contemporary dancers, they say it's ballet,” he says.) But, he enjoys pretty much all types of dance, and seeing so many is his favorite thing about the week.
“I don't think I've ever seen a style of dance that I am not interested in in some way—the variety and the diversity—and it's so great to see how people are thinking about putting their ideas and their concepts and their stories and the history of their own work into movement,” says Foehringer. It’s just exciting.”
“The Bay Area dance community offers pretty much anything dance-wise you could think of in some form,” he concludes—and Bay Area Dance Week is the place to see it all.
// Bay Area Dance Week runs from April 24th through May 3rd at various locations around the Bay Area. All events are free but some require RSVP. Find out what’s on when and sign up at dancersgroup.org/badw
Loving the Air: Aerial Dance Class is April 30th at 6pm (RJ Muna/Courtesy of BADW)
